'Downton Abbey' Review: The Curious Incident Of The Valet In The Night

In Sunday night's double episode of 'Downton Abbey' we are reminded that there is no honor among thieves.

Spoiler warning through Downton Abbey episodes 3.7 and 3.8.

I've been furiously watching as many Downton Abbey episodes as possible in my quest to catch up with Masterpiece Theatre's marvelous character drama. This is quite possibly the most gripping television I've seen in recent years outside of Breaking Bad.

Like Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey excels not merely at its drama, but at the difficult task of crafting complex characters who we want---or perhaps must---keep watching episode after episode.

Time is a funny thing in Downton Abbey. We don't progress neatly from one event to the next like most television dramas; rather, time crawls and leaps at its own merry pace.

Sometimes an episode follows on the chronological heels of its predecessor; other times, we lose months if not years and must wait for little visual or historical clues to provide our frame of reference. Fortunately, those clues are baked into the costumes, hair-styles, and dialogue with care down to the very smallest detail.

For a late viewer like myself, the sting of Sybil's tragic death is fresh still, even if some small time has passed at the Abbey.

Watching as the family embraces former chauffeur and erstwhile revolutionary Tom Branson more and more completely is surprisingly satisfying. Even Lord Grantham is beginning to come around during the Cricket game.

Partly I find Tom's acceptance satisfying because I feel so bad for his loss; partly it's because he's quickly become one of my favorite characters in the show, a stubborn but fiercely honest and eloquent man, willing to suffer much for the people he cares about.

Tom is an easy character to like. So is John Bates, whose release from prison was a relief. I kept expecting something terrible to happen there, though when tragedy came it was in the Grantham household itself rather than a cold prison cell.

A less sympathetic character is Thomas Barrow, whose very name evokes something grim and ghoulish. Barrow is vindictive, petty, and ambitious. He's not above every effort to ruin others, and if ever there were such a thing as karma, he finds himself on the bad end of it after crossing his once-partner-in-crime Ms. O'Brien, the only character in the show more vindictive, petty, and vicious than he.

Nonetheless, there have been glimpses of Barrow's human side. His fear during the war. His grief over the suicide of a young patient he was looking after back in Yorkshire. His renewed grief at the death of Sybil. And when he's led on by O'Brien's schemes with the handsome footman James, we feel for him then, too.

When it all goes horribly, horribly wrong and Barrow's not-so-secret secret is flung into the open, Mr. Carson describes him as "foul."

"I'm not foul, Mr. Carson," Thomas says at the end of the conversation. "I'm not like you, but I'm not foul."

Downton tackles homosexuality in this episode more than any other, and it's an interesting look at the time period. Barrow's sexual preferences were no secret, but they were kept under wraps and accepted. His "foulness" is forgiven almost entirely by the end, if only because Lord Grantham wants to keep him around for his Cricket matches.

This seems in keeping with the historical record. In Britain at the time, homosexual relationships were generally kept hush-hush but tolerated as long as they weren't overt. However, homosexuality did face unique perils in Britain. In 1885, a bill amended by Henry Labouchere, a Liberal member of parliament, criminalized all male homosexual acts (lesbianism was not illegal) making Britain the least hospitable place for gay men in Europe.

It was this law that came into play in Sunday night's episode, and that would have put Thomas Barrow, like Oscar Wilde before him, behind bars. Labouchere's law was not repealed until 1967. For many at the time, avoiding scandal was the most important thing. Far better to keep it all hushed up than to face the potential fallout.

And so once again we are faced with a sympathetic, beaten Thomas Barrow, a man who has squandered all his good will, all his money, and now must leave Downton with no reference at all---a perfect storm of misery and ruin into which the always compassionate John Bates inserts himself.

More interesting to me than Barrow's rescue at the hands of his rival is the secret that is dug just a tiny bit further from the dirt. O'Brien carries the darkest baggage of any of the staff, and Barrow is the only other one privy to it: that the lady's maid is responsible for the miscarriage of Lady Grantham's baby, and Robert's rightful heir.

It's no accident that the show's writers have brought this back to light, or that now Anna and Bates, two of the best and brightest characters in the show, have some small sliver of knowledge. Indeed, it won't be hard to put two and two together now. That Lady Grantham slipped on her soap and lost the baby is no secret, after all.

Meanwhile, Branson has finally had some success in prevailing to Lord Grantham's sense of duty (and vanity) in blessing Matthew's plans for the estate. I will say that Lord Grantham himself has become an increasingly difficult character to appreciate. In the beginning he seemed like the perfect argument to bring back the aristocracy: a gentlemen, a man of honor and duty, someone who led his household by respect rather than fear or authoritarianism.

But Robert is also the symbol of the ancien regime. He's the stalwart nobleman, lost in another time, incapable of adapting, with money but no sense of how money ought to be spent or invested (and who, quite hilariously, invokes the returns of one Mr. Ponzi in this latest episode.)

The faster the train of progress propels his family forward, the further Robert drifts from affable noble to stubborn reactionary, though it appears he may be finally resigning himself to turning new leaves---a submission to the changing times that even Lord Grantham must make, though not, I should add, his butler.

"Servants are always more conservative than their masters," Isobel Crawley said in one of the early episodes of the show. It seems she is still right, even these many years later.